Tuesday, 4 February 2014

From 5 February 2014 (until 19 February 2014) a new, free course is launched to address open content licensing for educators. the OERu (Open Educational Resources University - a group of universities around the globe).
The course has got the short OCL4Ed acronym, and it is a micro course organized by Otago Polytechnic. The Otago Politechnic will provide optional credentialing services (for a fee, did not find how much they are asking) for this mOOC which will carry credit towards the Open Education Practice elective of the Graduate Diploma in Tertiary Education. The OCL4Ed will be facilitated by the UNESCO OER Chair network in support of capability development for the UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration
But you can also simply register and follow the course for your own interest, in that case the course is free. In fact for those looking at the accreditation options, there is a great overview provided here.

The full syllabus of the 2 week course can be found here. The course structure has the following aim:Open content licensing for educators is a free micro Open Online Course (mOOC) designed for educators who want to learn more about open education resources,copyright, and creative commons licenses. This course will help you to:

Reflect on the practice of sharing knowledge in education and the permissions educators consider fair and reasonable;

Define what constitutes an open education resource (OER);

Explain how international copyright functions in a digital world;

Distinguish the types of Creative Commons licenses and explain how they support open education approaches;

Acquire the prerequisite knowledge required by educators to legally remix open education materials and help institutions to take informed decisions about open content licenses;

Use social media technologies to support your learning;

Connect with educators around the world to share thoughts and experiences in relation to copyright, OER and Creative Commons.

Thefacilitators for the course are Rory McGreal from Athabasca University and Ebba Ossiannilsson, from the Lund University, Sweden. They are both fabulous guide-on-the-side, filled with knowledge and always glad to share it. So there is a lot going for this course, it sure makes it worth following.